Hope- Sydney Schoenholtz

Sydney Schoenholtz

Hope – My Dreams for the World of the Future

My dreams for the world of the future. What a prompt. Immediately after receiving this topic from the Rabbi, I knew I had a dilemma. What do I say? I can sound really surface level and say “World peace! An end to famine and disease!” On the other hand, I can sound really pessimistic and say “World peace is unattainable and unrealistic”

I decided that I want to sound like all of the above. None of us can know what the future will hold. If in the near future, say tomorrow, everybody decided to put down their guns and be tolerant to one another that would be great. Unfortunately, I don’t see that happening. Not because I don’t have faith in humanity, but because I know how the world works (at least I think I do). Even in a tiny, affluent, white collar town like Marlboro we still can’t escape from corruption, the drug epidemic, and crime. If town-wide peace isn’t working out, how could world peace? World peace doesn’t seem to exist. At no point in history have humans- or any other creatures in nature- peacefully coexisted.

With all of this being said, the prompt asked what my dreams were for the future, so yes, my dream is that the human race can defy all odds and obtain real world peace, and also that there will be enough food for everyone to be full, and that racism and sexism ceases to exist. After all, the oxford dictionary defines a dream as an unrealistic or self-deluding fantasy. But what good is it going to do to entertain myself with self-deluding fantasies about the world and the future? Instead I think I can share my hopes for the future, or realistic goals based off of this dream.

What I want for the future is progress. I want people to put their egos aside, and start listening instead of shouting over one another. I want people to know what they are talking about before they make accusations, and think before they speak. I want education to be available for men and women worldwide. To say that racism and sexism will cease to exist may be a self-deluding fantasy, but I think that it is realistic to want people to approach these topics with open minds and open hearts, personal biases aside. I want people to see another person’s character before skin color and gender. I want world leaders to fight with words before resorting to armies.

These are all things that I think are completely attainable. I guess you can call it a dream of mine that I have for the future- but it’s more than that. It’s not an unrealistic self-deluding fantasy (as Oxford says dreams are)- it’s progress that can very well be made. It’s just baby steps! If everyone took a couple extra seconds to listen, we may be a step closer to world peace. If people put superficial things like egos and unimportant things like biases aside, we can have a much more tolerant world. With that, I just have two more words to say: Sydney out *mic drop* [See White House Correspondents’’ Dinner 2016].